Firefox Mobile 14 for Android Released

‪#Firefox‬ for ‪#Android‬. Something BIG is coming your way next week. http://mzl.la/KqFX3n

No one actually knew what they meant and they did not disclose any information themselves either. However, it is very clear now about what they meant by this tweet. Forfox Mobile 14 is now out for Android devices and as Mozilla says, the new version comes with a lot of improvement. We will be discussing about those improvements in this post.

To begin with, Mozilla has released a benchmark according to which Firefox renders nearly twice as many frames per second than Opera or Chrome for Android, and three times the fps of the previous Firefox version for Android, the Dolphin browser, and the default Android browser. Firefox says that this benchmark measures the actual user web experience.

When you start the browser, you see the thumbnails of quite popular websites, which you might also see on Opera Mini or Opera Mini Next browser for Android. This is similar to the speed dial that appears on the desktop version of Firefox.

As you can see in the above images, you can also set up Firefox Sync. This feature has been introduced with this update. Using Firefox Sync, you can sync all of your passwords, web history and bookmarks of the Desktop browser with the Android browser.

You can also install Addons on your Firefox Mobile browser which will let you access flash content across websites. For security reasons, content on websites that requires plugin will be displayed only if the plugin is enabled after loading the page.

To improve the security of the mobile browser, Do Not Track technology and Master password features are integrated within the browser.

Further, Firefox has also improved HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and open web standards capabilities of the browser. I am not sure how it would compete with Chrome for ICS and Opera Mini web browser which has been popular from the past few years on Android and other platforms. What are your thoughts about this? Let me know in the comments below.